1. Field of Invention
The present general inventive concept relates generally to navigation of surgical components and, more particularly, to systems and methods to assist a surgeon in navigating anatomical regions of a patient to properly position and locate surgical components, adjuncts, surgical guides, goggles, dressings, instruments, and other surgical components before, during, and after injury or surgery of a patient, and for navigation and use around wounds and surgical sites.
2. Description of the Related Art
The controlled positioning of surgical instruments and other components is of significant importance in many surgical procedures and wound care applications, and various methods and navigation systems have been developed to navigate surgical components relative to a patient during surgery. Intra-operative navigation systems are comparable to global positioning satellite (GPS) systems commonly used in automobiles and are composed of three primary components: a localizer, which is analogous to a satellite in space; an instrument or surgical probe adjunct, guide, goggle, or dressing, which represents the track waves emitted by the GPS unit in the vehicle; and CT scan and/or other data sets such as MRI, PET/CT, or optical data sets that are analogous to a road map of the anatomical structure of the patient. These image navigation techniques generally allow positioning of a surgical instrument within a margin of error of about 1 to 2 mm, or sub mm accuracy depending on the scan.
Computer assisted image guidance techniques typically involve acquiring preoperative images of the relevant anatomical structures and generating a data base which represents a three dimensional model of the anatomical structures. The position of the instrument relative to the patient is determined by the computer using at least three fixed reference elements that span the coordinate system of the object in question. The process of correlating the anatomic references to the digitalized data set constitutes the registration process. The relevant surgical instruments or other components and surgical sites typically have a known and fixed geometry which is also defined preoperatively. During the surgical procedure, the position of the component being used is registered with the anatomical coordinate system and a graphical display showing the relative positions of the tool and anatomical structure may be computed and displayed to assist the surgeon in properly positioning and manipulating the surgical component with respect to the relevant anatomical structure.
One of the disadvantages of known systems is the need to maintain proper positioning of surgical instruments relative to movable anatomic references when those references are moved during surgery, and to enable surgeons to properly position surgical instruments in real time when anatomical reference points are moved during surgery.